A few years ago, after taking a tumble down the stairs, I was laid up in bed for days. The book I'd started just before that misfortune was called Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, by Mason Currey. Originally, I'd intended to skim it. As with much of what I read, my goal was to scrape any general insights it might provide for my research on high achievement—and then move on.

But with the pain of back spasms as a constant refrain, I found relief in reading that book, page by page, as mindfully as possible. Essentially, Daily Rituals describes the idiosyncratic routines of writers, artists, and other creators. Currey is a collector of habits, documenting the typically monotonous routines that seem to enable fiercely original creativity.

And this is the magic of habits: do the same thing in the same place and at the same time each day, and it becomes second nature.

Writer Maya Angelou's daily ritual was to get up and have coffee with her husband, and then, by seven in the morning, deliver herself to a "tiny, mean" hotel room with no distractions until two in the afternoon. Angelou is one of my very favorite authors, and I felt the thrill of communion when I considered my own weekday routine of having breakfast with my husband and children each morning, and then when everyone had left the house, sitting down with the last sips of my coffee to work on whatever bit of writing I was currently struggling to accomplish.

Jack Gantos, another favorite author whom I desperately wanted to profile as a paragon of grit—an exemplar of passion and perseverance for long-term goals—insisted he didn't qualify for such a courageous-sounding title. As evidence, when we spoke, he let me know that he did nothing more than follow a routine of feeding the cat and his family, then trundling off to the local public library, putting in his hours of writing and rewriting, day in and day out. Nothing glamorous, nothing heroic.

But here's the thing about habits: for getting work done, they're better than heroism.

What are habits? Habits are behaviors we carry out without conscious awareness. Driving home without thinking about where to turn left or right is one example. Eating popcorn while watching movies is another. Saying thank you when you make a purchase is a habit, and so is saying "bless you" when you hear someone sneeze.

So while you can surely think of bad habits you'd like to break, there are likely at least as many good habits that enable you to be more productive, more helpful, and happier than you'd be without them. "Our virtues are habits as much as our vices," psychologist William James once said. Modern science affirms this century-old speculation. My collaborator Brian Galla, a psychologist at the University of Pittsburgh, has found that the virtue of self-control, for example, relies heavily on habit. More self-controlled individuals develop healthy habits for eating, studying, and getting what they want to do done—so that, paradoxically, they achieve their goals while expending less conscious effort than their more impulsive counterparts.

Work may never be easy for you, but you can make it easier by making it a habit.

And this is the magic of habits: do the same thing in the same place and at the same time each day, and it becomes second nature. Work may never be easy for you, but you can make it easier by making it a habit.

By the last page of Daily Rituals, my back was much better, and when I got out of bed, it was with the daily rituals of hundreds of creators filed away in memory. I had no ambition to change my own routine to match anyone else's, but my resolution to stick to a routine that works for me had doubled.

I recently finished writing a book about my research on grit. It was by far the hardest thing I've ever done. And yet I don't consider the act of finishing it heroic in the least. It was, instead, the very embodiment of the ancient Roman aphorism: per ardua ad astra. From striving (daily, without glamour, as a matter of routine) to the stars.

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